


as close to hell

by midrashic



Series: conjurings [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Homophobia, Alternate Universe - The Conjuring, Community: MI6 Cafe | mi6_cafe, Epistolary, Established Relationship, Haunted Houses, M/M, MI6 Cafe Occult October Challenge, Married Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26359999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.—Romeo,Romeo & JulietI.v.114-115
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Series: conjurings [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1174220
Comments: 24
Kudos: 68
Collections: Sp00qy





	as close to hell

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

CHAPTER 9—THE MAYFAIR MYSTERY

Just around the corner from the most haunted house in London, a quiet, residential lane runs from Berkeley Square to one of the city's busiest commercial streets. Crammed between the lure of Vera Lynn's London and the Burberry and Dior stores are budding families in airy terrace houses for young professionals who are rich, but not obscenely, obnoxiously rich.

There's a puzzle living at #36.

To his neighbors, James Bond lives an ordinary sort of life, a life one struggles to connect to the tabloid headlines and the frivolous lawsuits. Too charismatic for his own good, perhaps, but handy with a tire jack and always willing to grab a shovel after the odd snowfall here and there. A former student recalls a dry wit and a keen perception, but also unexpected kindnesses: bringing in snacks for his class every day after discovering that one of his students was regularly skipping meals to pay her school fees, an extra tutoring session held specially for the student working two jobs who could only come in late at night. A Leicester minister who requested a consultation from James recalls his imperturbability: "He always acted as though there were nothing to be afraid of… that wasn't true, but he made it feel true. He makes people feel as though they're in the steadiest, most capable hands possible." The clerk at Marlborough Books reports that his tastes tend toward biographies, the newer science fiction, and the odd supernatural romance novel, complete with bare-chested werewolves in mid-transformation clutching swooning buxom heroines. To speak casually of James Bond is to describe a well-documented phenomenon: smooth, seasoned, unshakeable.

Twenty years ago, he was someone else entirely. Among the vast range of people who encountered James Bond in some form over between 19-- and 20--, whether as ally or accomplice, medium or menace, one common thread unites their descriptions of the man. Brash, incautious, borderline self-destructive. Here was a man who had made a living out of battling the things that lived in the dark, but the alienated, lonely existence caused by being a spirit-hunter in a world of sceptics did not suit him. He always needed someone to ground him, agreed clients and drinking partners and Church officials who'd crossed paths with him at one time or another. He was the best at what he did, and it was going to get him killed. And he might not even care.

But it didn’t kill him. Since not dying young and extravagantly, he's--acquaintances have a wide assortment of words to describe how James has changed, including "mellowed," "settled down," "grown up." He's upgraded from grotty council housing to posh, polished Mayfair. He's happily married. He's happy, one might even venture to say. 

And yet. Those who spend any length of time with James leave with the distinct impression of his proficiency in the blacker aspects of his work. "A knowing beyond the telling," one neighbour said. "There are scars there," said fellow medium and once–close friend Tamora Abbott. Former client Geraldine Lessly, after being interviewed for this book, merely wished him peace. Nearly everything of substance about James has transformed from the hostile young man with a death wish, from his prospects to his solitude, except for these: his charm, his shrewd intuition, his cultivated sense of irony, and his darkness. 

“That’s the paradox of James Bond,” explains William Tanner, the Bonds’ on-call expert in paranormal videography. “The greatest danger a demonologist faces is temptation. Aside from being incredibly physically taxing—often an exorcist will have to be hospitalised right beside the host after casting out a spirit—repeated contact with the supernatural wears most people down, weakens their defenses. Older paranormalists have the benefit of experience, but also the disadvantage of being more vulnerable to the things they battle. At some point you have to leave it behind.

“James isn’t that old—but the likelihood that he’s going to make it to that age while actively investigating… it’s a mystery. The abyss has gazed long at James Bond, and James has gazed back maybe longer and more deeply than any other medium currently active. And still, he’s never wavered from the side of the angels.”

When asked whether that was a meaningful choice of words, Bill Tanner smiles crookedly and answers, “Maybe.”

– ♠ –

It starts with a letter postmarked from Glencoe. Q runs his fingers over the envelope and thinks he catches a trace of heather, of bitter coffee, the postman’s impatience and his husband’s dread as he hands it over. James lingers over the irredeemable scrawl of the return address, a mess of concern and suspicion and old, old aches playing out underneath his still expression, and unseals it at last. Inside is a newspaper clipping and a note, more of that illegible scribble. Q leans over James’s shoulder and reads:

STRANGE OCCURRENCES KEEP LOCALS IN FEAR

followed by a short piece ostensibly about a housekeeper at one of the local inns who disappeared for two days and now refuses to speak. What it’s really about is the fog of terror that has settled over the four hundred-odd villagers after a series of animal mutilations and encounters with an indefinable “phantom” that has left even the most hardened sceptics scared witless. The maid is the second person to have actually disappeared: the first was an eight-year-old boy who was missing for eighteen hours and now wakes with screaming nightmares he is unable to describe. James digests this in silence before he pulls out the note.

 _James_ —

_Something is wrong here. I may not understand exactly what you do now, but I know you can help. Come home._

_You know I wouldn’t ask this of you lightly._

_A. K._

Q leans his head against James’s, closes his eyes. “Don’t,” he whispers, and James must be sunk deep into his own reasons for not going, because he doesn’t even question him, just tucks the letter and article back into the envelope and shoves it all to the back of their junk drawer. Q kisses him, not quite a reward and not quite a desperate thanks, but too deeply, too fiercely, to be completely casual.

They don’t talk about it for four days. Q halfheartedly begins to clear out the attic. James makes paprikash. But when Q opens his eyes and runs a questing, melancholy hand over the cold sheets where James ought to be, he knows where he’ll find him. As sure as prophecy, James is standing in front of the junk drawer, already four hundred miles away. Q scowls and wraps them both up in the quilt he’s dragged off the bed.

“I have to go, Q,” James says softly, like they’ve been having this conversation all along.

Q buries his face between James’s shoulderblades. “Please.”

“You know I have to. It’s only going to get worse.”

“Maybe it has nothing to do with you.”

“I’d still go. They need help. We don’t turn anyone away.” There’s a hint of a smile in his voice. “Your rules, remember?”

Q just shakes his head, forehead pressed against James’s shoulder, and James turns and catches him in his arms, blankets and bedhead and all. With the quilt pulled up over their heads, Q can almost imagine they’re in a cocoon of safety, somewhere the cold breath of premonition can’t reach them. But half of James is already in Scotland, and even as he speaks, Q knows he won’t be able to draw him back home, “You know that I’ve—I’ve been dreaming of your death. If you go, I—I can’t _protect_ you, I can’t—”

James’s arms tighten around him. “You protect me every day.”

Not enough, Q thinks desperately. Not nearly enough. Stone burning and pitch splattering and James screaming, every night until the last weeks blur together in a haze of horror and preemptive grief and the taste of brackish water in his mouth. Here it’s so easy to believe that James’s arms will always be around him, that he will always have this refuge, that they will never be apart. That love is stronger than death. He nods wetly. James sighs into his hair.

“I’m coming with you,” he mumbles into James’s shoulder. The arms around him tighten, relief and consternation. But they’re a pair, the two of them. What use is a shield without a sword?

They leave for Skyfall in the morning.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

Over 34% of Brits believe in some kind of supernatural phenomenon, and that number is growing. The age of Spiritualism and the Theosophical Society have given way to a broader acceptance of the occult in everyday life. Instrumental to that change have been widely-publicized cases of cursed objects and demonic possession, and the Bonds have been at the forefront of that shift. “With so many people willing to testify to the efficacy of professional mediums, you have to wonder whether there is something to all this psychic claptrap after all,” Michelle Mohanty says in the introduction of her little-known 2009 book _Who Ya Gonna Call: The Last Hundred Years in Psychic Events._

But Lewis Frayn, noted sceptic and psychological researcher, has a different view. “The allure of myths like ESP and demonic possession is that these are phenomena inherently only observable by special people. Science is never going to be able to verify the existence of psychic powers, because science is all about what is demonstrably true, no matter who is doing the perceiving. Yes, the anecdotal evidence attesting to the skill of mediums, like Gloria Tung of Chicago or London’s very own Mr. and Mr. Bond, cannot be discounted. But we also have to take into account the factors that would make these so-called ‘eyewitnesses’ vulnerable to manipulation: grief, mental illness, or a powerful desire to believe in the afterlife.”

Frayn takes a softer tack to the parapsychological than most of his colleagues. “I do think that most of these mediums believe they are genuinely helping people,” Frayn admits. “We don’t criticize priests or pastors for offering help that is grounded in personal belief instead of the scientific method. But my advice? Whether you go to a church or a psychic because of strange noises in your house is your own business. But call a plumber, too.”

– ♠ –

The drive up north is long and grey. Q leans his head against the window and watches his breath rhythmically mist and uncloud the glass, motorway and trunk roads floating by and fading, the farther they get, into long, uninterrupted stretches of green. They turn onto two-lane asphalt with the radio playing low as they wind through steeply sloping hills that seem poised to crash over them like waves. Q sleeps a bit; James doesn’t. Q’s eyes keep going to James’s technically perfect but unnaturally stiff grip on the steering wheel. Around hour six, he reaches over and rests his hand lightly on James’s thigh. James doesn’t relax, but Q thinks perhaps the lines around his eyes soften, just a little.

Glencoe Village is arranged in the classic style of small British towns, houses and buildings lined up on a single main road, all smooth white stone and slate roofs. They get in late and check in at an inn whose blank white exterior belies the surprisingly modern lobby and rooms. Q takes one look at their tastefully appointed bed with a sweet little checked blanket spread across the foot and proceeds to crawl into it and pass out. Travel always leaves him groggy. He closes his eyes to the vision of James looking out the window, his expression inscrutable to anyone but Q.

It’s dark when Q stirs as the hotel-firm mattress dips under someone else’s weight.

James’s breath wisps across the back of his neck. “Go back to sleep, my love,” he murmurs.

Q does. When he opens his eyes again, he finds that James is curled behind him, arm over Q’s waist, their fingers entangled together like a comfort, like a balm. James’s brow is finally relaxed in sleep. (In the space between thought and reality, Q reaches out and gathers James's mind to him, draws the darkness from his drowsing. Only good dreams.)

In the morning they walk the streets of a town so small that the one café, filling station, and pub all simply bear the town name, no need to distinguish themselves from any others: Glencoe Petrol, Glencoe Grocery. No one recognizes them; the town is a bit of a tourist destination, so strange faces are, if not quite everywhere, hardly newsworthy, and James hasn’t been here since he was sixteen. They ask about the disappearances, the animal deaths, the will-o’-the-wisps in the bogs and the sensation of being watched and the strange oppressive mood that has settled over the town for all of these reasons and none of them. The locals are distracted by their own troubles, but the questions turn them cold. Finally, after a failed attempt to gather information at the pub, James leans over the bar and says, “Say, is Irene still around?”

The barman, a tall, thickset fellow with a beard you could suffocate in, eyes him suspiciously. “An’ how do you know Irene?”

“I grew up here,” James says, as if it’s nothing at all. “On the Bond manor.”

The barman squints at them, but before he can say anything, a weather-beaten woman wrapped up thickly in several cardigans trundles up behind him. “James?” she says, sounding out the name slowly, like she’s forgotten how to pronounce it after all these years. “James Bond?”

“Lo, Irene,” James says. Her eyes widen.

“Don’t just stand there goggling, you numpty,” she snaps at the barman. “Get out the good ale for our guests. Well, well, little James Bond. I thought you’d never come home.”

Irene’s father, James explains to Q, ran the pub before her, and Irene had worked there since before James had been born. Back when he was a wild—but still unaccountably charming—teenager, she used to slip him the odd pint when he wandered inside after an evening spent loitering around the village. Over their promised tankards, which do prove delightfully dark and mellow on the tongue, James neatly deflects questions on what he’s done with his life since leaving abruptly, absolutely, without the thought of return. 

Irene asks about Q. “My husband,” James says simply. When he rests his hand over Q’s, their rings clink together. Irene gives him a smile bordering on the watery.

Confronted with little James Bond, grown and quietly happy, Irene is more pliable than the other townsfolk, but not by much. She has to be nudged into talking, and when she does, she can’t pin down specific supernatural sightings or events. “Seems everyone’s a ghost story now,” she says. “No way a’knowing who’s got the right of it.” She looks worried. For herself, but even more for them. “If that’s what you came here for… you’d best leave. I’ve a notion asking’ll only make it worse.”

When they step outside, it’s full dark. The street is almost empty; there’s a gaggle of old men smoking by the café. It’s cold. Q crowds up next to James to get out of the wind. “Well?” James asks quietly.

Q shakes his head. “There’s definitely _something_ here. But I can’t see it clearly. All I get is hints… Quivers of intent. Malevolence. I know I should be getting more, but it’s like—someone’s thrown a blanket over my senses.”

James nods. He looks out over the street, the buildings, the tall hills rolling back behind them. After a moment he says, voice rising and falling in the cadence of memory, “After Irene turned me out, I’d walk home from here. There’s a road up to the manor, but it’s quicker to cut across the moor… When I woke up the next morning, the sheets would smell like heather. In all those nights, I never met Black Donald, or the Cù-Sith. No phantoms, no faeries, no demons. Never imagined that I’d have a need for local myth. Or faith.”

“What next?” Q asks softly. James turns his head north, like a lost hunting dog heeding a distant call, and doesn’t answer.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

An incomplete list of ghosts, inhuman spirits, demonic presences, and other night terrors the Bonds have encountered over the course of their distinguished careers:

  * a malicious entity that took on the distorted shape of a dead child to possess living children and terrorize a local playground;
  * the human soul trapped in a marionette as the result of a curse, conscious of every moment but unable to move or speak;
  * an inhuman spirit making phone calls to its victim of loved ones being tortured;
  * a cursed glass eye which would slowly but inexorably drive the person using it insane with visions of monstrous alternate futures;
  * the View-Master that would show someone a distorted animated version of a loved one's recent or upcoming death in sparkling, crisp detail;
  * the small hand-mirror whose power inspired a young essayist-journalist named Wilde to write one of the English language's greatest Gothic novels;
  * the five-year-old child who brutally murdered her entire family and later claimed that she had been possessed by a devil called "Grendel";
  * restless spirits inhabiting a house that had formerly been a funeral home whose bodies had been abused by the depraved proprietors;
  * a toddler who disappeared between the frames of a home video;
  * an antique cursed crucifix which inevitably twisted and perverted its owner's mind and nature;
  * a "ghost cur" spreading rabies to children in a rural community who had no evidence of animal bites on their bodies;
  * delusions and psychosis which only grew worse once a carbon monoxide leak was fixed, including reports of the walls bleeding and the family pet screaming at residents to murder their neighbors;
  * the woman who disappeared, with every photo and portrait of her face being scratched out at the same moment;
  * the vicious misfortune tracking down the extended members of a family which had descended, centuries ago, from priests;
  * a witch whose grotesque sacrifices in life allowed him to feed on the families who would go on to inhabit his home;
  * fourteen possessions by inhuman spirits;
  * three demonic possessions;
  * hallucinations with sometimes deadly consequences, like the teenage boy who bit into a lightbulb instead of an apple, or the woman who took an ax to the walls of her house and was convinced for the rest of her life that she had murdered her entire family; buildings with bloody histories, from mass cult suicides to hospital coma wards; folk tales coming true, Bloody Mary in the mirror, a hitchhiker vanishing from the passenger seat; inexplicable bruises and wounds, either transferred over from dreams or with no explanation at all; figures only visible in the shadowed negative space of photographs; spiritually impossible encounters with people who don't seem to be aware that they’re dead; physically impossible bodily changes; psychologically impossible suicides and psychotic breaks; impossible sights; impossible sensations; the impossible;
  * and much, much more.



– ♠ –

The next day, they drive out of town and into the countryside.

Skyfall manor is waiting for them. The grounds are sprawling, flat marsh stretching out in every direction until the hills begin to rise. Technically, James explained on the way down, idle conversation to soothe the nerves that Q can see in his tapping fingers and the way he never looks at Q, not once, the Bond estate only spans about 3,600 acres, but most of the surrounding land belongs to no one at all, so in effect it’s much larger. The wind batters against the car windows, but for Q, it seems as though a hush has fallen over the world as they enter the valley. Skyfall is so remote, so alone, it feels like silence radiates from it, though the sounds of the outdoors are always present. James drives them right up to the building, climbs outside, spends a long moment looking at the stone walls and darkened windows. At the inn, he’d called Kincade, the letter-writer and groundskeeper, to open up and air out the house, but it seems that he’s already been and gone. Perhaps he thought it best that they met Skyfall as it was instead of attempting to paper over the emptiness and loneliness with a friendly presence.

When James makes no move to enter, Q takes his arm. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s walk around for a bit.”

James smiles at him, a crooked little sunrise of a thing, and they do.

It's been decades, but James navigates the bogs and marsh as easily as breathing. The wind drives them closer together, but where Q shudders away from the cold fingers of the air slipping under his collar, James leans into it, looking brighter, sharper, more alive. Even as something in James has wound tighter over the past few days, the wild and the weather and the sky have stirred something else in him, perhaps the sleeping seed of the boy he once was. James points out childhood landmarks with wistful humour in his tone. When he was eight, he fell into that bog there and was sick for a month. That rock is where the tiny pink scar on his knee is from. He used to hide from his tutors in that church, and, when they got wise to his hiding places, learned to climb the rafters.

Q is laughing, memorizing the image of the tiny James that peeks out of the few old photographs they have perched mischievously on a ceiling beam like a particularly adorable imp, when James’s gaze slides past the church, to the cemetery.

Q’s laughter dies out. He feels the change in the air like a weathervane.

“He’s not buried here,” James says to Q’s unasked question. “Hannes wanted to take him home, to be with his mother. I was gone by then, of course. Kincade told me about it later.”

“And your parents?” Q says softly.

James pushes the old iron gate open. Monique and Andrew Bond are buried at the the edge of the graveyard, a simple stone stele marking the spot, newer than most but still stained with time. Standing over his parents' weed-overgrown and windswept grave with his hands stuffed in his pockets, he looks very alone, and very young. Q meets his in-laws for the first time that way, under the shadow of a church long-empty of God, the forbidding stone face of Skyfall manor barely visible in the distance. TRAGICALLY DEPARTED is engraved in small letters under their names. There is no joyous remembrance for this pair; only loss, and loss.

“After they died, I found it hard to get close to anyone,” James says. “Kincade, Hannes… they all tried. I felt like I was… underwater. But _he_ —he was like catching a glimpse of the sun.” He falls silent. The gravestone can pass no judgment on him one way or another, but he looks to it anyway, maybe waiting to be punished for his own part in the whole sordid affair, maybe searching for a sign to guide him on. 

Q takes his hand. This, too, is a kind of exorcism.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

For all that they regularly encounter the world of the dead, there is very little to distinguish the Bonds from any ordinary couple. James runs; Q watches _Doctor Who_ religiously; they spoil their cat. But their abilities—and responsibilities—are never far from mind. Whether it’s in James’s watchful stance or the casual way Q has of intuiting small details from a client or an interviewer, their connection to the supernatural colours every aspect of the Bonds’ domestic bliss. Such is the life of a person with Q’s sensitivity, or James’s experience.

James is the sceptic, if there can be such a thing among a pair of paranormal researchers. In addition to being the only non-ordained demonologist authorised to perform an exorcism by the Church of England, James specialises in leaky pipes, creaky floorboards, and moaning houses. “Most supernatural encounters are a product of the imagination,” he explains. “What we do is by nature unscientific. There’s no body of knowledge to fall back on. For a layperson, that can be confusing. We’ve talked to a thousand different people with a thousand different convictions about how the supernatural works. But it’s not like religion, the workings of the spirit world don’t vary from person to person. The world of the supernatural has rules; they’re just hidden from sight.”

Q, who James describes as “naturally attuned to psychic energy,” is more apt to see the supernatural in the everyday. “It doesn’t have to be something you think of as paranormal,” he says. “Maybe it’s a call that gets returned right when you’re thinking of someone. An unexpected recovery from illness. Falling in love with the person you’re meant to be with,” he adds with a smile. Where James speaks of “hauntings,” Q uses the more encompassing “presences.” For James, the supernatural is intensely human: grudges, injustices, love affairs. Q takes a broader view, in which the flow of phenomena ebbs and swells according to a mysterious divine will. With one hand taking the pulse of what might be supernatural ley lines, he struggles to explain the world he sees, where times and places overlap and occasionally bleed through each other. Q objects to being called “psychic”—he prefers the term “clairvoyant,” from the French _clear seeing_. It’s not a superpower, he explains; it’s a heightened awareness of the world.

One thing that James and Q do agree on is the grand battle being conducted at every moment between good and evil. On rare occasions, they catch glimpses of their own roles in this vast Manichean order: two small points of light in a net against the dark; always defiant, always together.

– ♠ –

Hand in hand, they ramble back towards the manor and its gables and gloom and grim, hostile work as the sun begins to gesture towards setting. They don’t speak—they’ve never had to speak, but since a certain psychic adventure years ago in which Q spent some time in James’s head during a particularly fraught exorcism, sometimes it feels like they are beyond speech with each other, more one soul than two. Q mostly brushes this feeling off as a lingering effect of the intensity of that moment, the unshakable knowledge that for a fraction of a second, he had _been_ James, and that brief and wonderful glimpse meant that no one in the world could know James better than Q, even though their hypersensitivity to each other’s presence had faded after a few days. But sometimes it’s nice to imagine that they are connected on a level deeper than anyone else in human history. Romantic.

There is nothing warm or romantic about Skyfall manor.

This time, as James nears the entrance, he doesn't hesitate. He drags open the windowless wood door, left unlocked in anticipation of their arrival, and, with Q at his elbow, steps into the dim, draughty relic of his childhood home. Q keeps his attention on James, on the curious blankness with which he greets the musty rooms and familiar halls, but part of him soaks it all in. For some reason, he'd imagined it… darker, in James's stories. It's a little old-fashioned—smaller windows than today's style, antique furniture, wood panelling _everywhere_ —but it's actually rather… nice. Lonely, maybe, but thoughtfully and elegantly furnished. 

And yet something about the idea of James, in whom Q knows there is an implacable restlessness, growing up here, all bone china and stag motif and English country house–in–Scotland, rubs him the wrong way. Though the wind cut them through, it felt much more natural to see James striding across the heath than it does to imagine him, all elbows and knees, reading in front of the great fireplace. It suits his warmth better.

James ghosts a melancholy hand over a windowpane. He's composed, almost content. Like he'd entered the house and found that the shadows of the past had not hung quite as heavy over it as he'd imagined after all. 

Without looking over, James holds out his arm. Q smiles, crowds under it. James rests his cheek against Q's hair and sighs. “Would it be terribly cliché if I said it’s smaller than I remember?”

“Yes,” Q teases.

James presses his face more firmly against Q’s crown. “Thank you,” he says after a moment. "I know this hasn't been easy for you—”

Q raises a hand to cut him off. "Shh."

It's a testament to how much affection James has for him that he snaps his mouth shut without question and only a little indignation. Q tilts his head. He could've sworn he'd heard—

 _Mew_.

And again! Not with his ears, he realizes, but as if the sound had sprung directly from the mind. James doesn't react, but given that Q has him well-trained to respond to sounds of feline distress and would have his hide if he ever ignored Gideon like that, he suspects it’s probably out of obliviousness instead of active malice toward the… psychic cat of Skyfall?

Q turns his head, triangulating. Then he sets off at a quick clip toward the back of the house. "Q!" James protests, though he doesn’t hesitate to follow. Intent, Q tracks that faint miserable wail through a parlor, another parlor, a dining room, and finally a heavy, unornamented set of wooden doors that seem to lead to nowhere. Behind him, James’s breath catches. That at last snags Q’s attention; he turns, questioning, but James just shakes his head and motions him forward. Q unbolts and pulls open the doors, the only place in a manor that is surprisingly dust-free for how long it’s been unoccupied where cobwebs cling to the corners. They open on—a tunnel? Carved inexpertly from the rock, as incongruous and rough against the muted splendor of Skyfall as James, spiralling down, down, down. Q stares into the pitch-blackness, bewildered. “Why do you have a secret passageway in your family mansion?”

“It’s not a mansion,” James sighs, “it’s a lodge. And _that_ is a priest hole. There’s another entrance through the cellar.” 

"Oh." Yowling abated for the moment, Q peers more closely at the swallowing dark, imagining hiding in that glorified pit for hours, days, long enough to suffocate or go mad. Against his better judgment, he reaches out to brush the irregular stone wall with his fingers—

— _they’re gone, they’re gone, what point is there in anything if they’re gone, leave me alone, go away Kincade, leave me_ alone, _just let me have the dark—_

He draws back, and the faint mental pressure of the lingering pain of a James from long ago vanishes.

When he turns his head, James is looking at him. At him, not at the grave of his childhood. “It was a long time ago,” he says gently. “What did you sense?”

As if on cue, the mewling starts up again. Q kneels, ignoring the way James’s eyebrows have shot up, and coos into the darkness, “Who’s there? I won't bite. Here, come here, darling."

James makes a noise of pure chagrin—he knows full well that Q only calls one kind of creature _darling_ , and it's not him—and says, "Q, there are no cats hiding in my Catholic ancestors' illegal escape hatch—"

"Here, kitty darling," Q croons, and a small ghost-white cat trots out of the dark. James falls into a silence Q can only interpret smugly as displeased bafflement.

The cat sniffs at Q curiously, and Q reaches out to pet it—

—and its fur passes right through his hand, like a hologram. Not just spectrally pale, but actually _spectral_.

Huh. The cat blinks lazily at him. Q sits back on his haunches and stares back. That's… different.

"That's his cat," James says suddenly. "That's—what?—that's—she must have been in the room when… I didn't even think to look for her—"

Q scowls, but lets it go. He can’t blame James for any delinquent behavior like cat neglect before they met. He concentrates fiercely on the material presence of the cat—her cool blue eyes, her stillness, her thick, luxurious fur that must've gotten her mistaken for a small throw pillow many times in life—finds the psychic shape of her, and reaches out and picks her up. The cat gives him a slow blink, as though considering wriggling or phasing right out of his hands, but settles after a tense moment and lets him pet her. Q gives James an elated smile, who just looks back at him blankly as though still trying to work out why a dead cat is not-living in his house.

On one level, this is incredibly worrying. The presence of a ghost in spite of the fact that cats lack anything that could reasonably be called a soul suggests that there is a powerful psychic disturbance here, a tragedy so terrible it keeps spirits bound to this place so completely that even animals are caught in its snare. On another level, the cat is now kneading at his thigh cheerfully, and her fur is both as insubstantial as cloud and as tangible as spun cotton between his fingers. "What's her name?" Q asks.

“Sodom.”

Q barks out a startled laugh. _“Really?”_

"Yes, I know," James grumbles, "I probably should've realized that something was wrong much sooner than I did."

"Well, that won't do at all," Q says to the cat-who-will-definitely-not-be-known-as-Sodom-from-now-on. "Let's try something a little less calamitous, shall we? What about… Solomon?"

"No," James says sharply. "Absolutely not. We are not adopting a dead cat. We're not even adopting another live cat. One is more than enough."

"Ignore him, he's a grump," Q singsongs to Solomon. It's not as though Q tries to take home _every_ stray cat he comes across. True, James only ended up getting him a brown-and-orange mog, now an eighteen-pound beast named Gideon who likes to nap in their soup pots and trinket bowls, in the hopes of discouraging him from feeding every one of the strays of first Clapham and then Mayfair.

There's just—something unutterably tragic about it, a blameless creature caught in the no-man's-land between life and death, probably wandering the grounds, unseen, unheard, for decades until someone with Q's sensitivity came along and coaxed her into gossamer being. He has to focus to pet her, but when he does, a purr like white noise rises up from her and sends static along his skin. "I bet you've been so lonely, all these years with the master gone and the house shut up. Would you like a brother? I think you would, wouldn't you?"

 _"No,"_ says James with the desperation of a man who knows he's already lost.

Q gives him the imploring look that has always melted James's resolve ever since their first disagreement, over the thermostat. "It's not like we'll be spending more on cat food. And you're always complaining about how Gideon sheds on your suits, surely phantom fur will be a nice change?"

"We don't even know if it'll stick around after we do—whatever we need to do to fix this place."

" _If_ she stays," Q says, "we can't just leave her here. And we can hardly drop her off at a shelter or something."

"Can't we?" James grumbles. "You can't be the only person in the world that can touch her."

Q beckons him closer. James unenthusiastically crouches beside him and lets Q take his hand and guide it to Solomon's bushy fur. There's a little moment of resistance where human and cat are occupying the same space but different planes, an ontological mismatch, but Q pushes against it and suddenly James is touching something almost solid, his fingers brushing against her nearly-real pelt. His scowl relaxes in spite of itself. Q hides his smile. There’s no need to rub his triumph in.

"Gideon's not going to like it," James warns. Of this, Q has no doubt—James and Gideon are remarkably similar in temperament, and Q can usually predict one's reaction to any sort of upheaval in their home by the other's—but he also knows that, like James, Gideon is lonely and getting on in years and that a companion, even a translucent one, will perk him up considerably. Q rubs Solomon's ears happily and wonders whether her incorporeality will keep her from knocking over their vases.

And then a hum runs under his skin, like a fever chill. In Q's arms, Solomon tenses and angles her head towards something in the darkness. James is at once on his feet and wary, peering into the dark, but before Q can call out to him, tell him not to go any further, tell him that the dark is rapidly thickening and something indefinable building like a psychic blister, Solomon darts out of his arms into the passageway. "No!" Q protests and scrambles after her. "Come here, kitty—"

James swears and grabs for them both but Q is already fumbling his way along the stone walls, calling after her. He hears James go for the light switch and curse when the utility lights along the walls only flicker half-heartedly before subsiding again. He scuffs his feet against the uneven floor and tries not to think about how distant the square of light that is the entrance is getting. His hand traces what feels like a turn in the rock and then the light is gone entirely. But a few steps after that, he feels something as soft as still air brush against his calves.

He reaches down blindly and Solomon springs into his arms, and at once the stupidity of plunging thoughtlessly into the dark hits him. It's colder here, not underground cold but _Hell_ cold, and he doesn’t want to be here but at the same time he can’t wrench himself away from the sense that he’s staring something in the eye and that looking away would be a mistake, a signal to a lion or some other sharp-toothed predator that he is easy pickings. “James?” he calls out softly, but suddenly all the light and warmth that is James Bond seems very far away. 

There's a scratching in the wall. It itches at the back of his mind like a bite, a door cracked open. He feels like a magnet, like a buoy pulled by the tide, like a lodestone. There is a scratching in the wall, and Q wants to see. He needs to see.

Against his better judgment, in spite of everything Q knows about this house and its whole haunted, jagged history, he reaches out a hand and lays it against the stone wall.

And in the instant before James finally gets the lights working worlds and decades away, he sees— _everything._

_(a wet gasping for breath under wild briny water and a hungry maw in the dark, James crying out, James screaming, shouting his name, a boy with a horrible scar running through his right eye and a dead-white fist around James's heart, a circle started long ago drawing to a close, and everything, everything in flames)_

When James finds them in the secret passage of Skyfall bare moments later, Solomon is nudging anxiously at Q's lax fingers and Q is slumped in the dirt, unconscious, the cracked-open sound of his scream still hanging in the air.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

In 20--, things came to a head. Over the span of eight months, the Bonds became embroiled in two separate legal proceedings, the first a civil suit in front of the Queen's Bench, the second a criminal indictment charging Q specifically with fraud by false representation. In a peculiar departure from the usual pattern of lawsuits filed against psychics, the civil suit accused the Bonds of negligence in their determination that the Mooreland house was _not_ haunted, resulting in fees in excess of tens of thousands of pounds when the Moorelands contracted another professional medium to cleanse the property, which by that time had suffered from severe "spiritual degradation." Though quickly dismissed, it was much-lampooned in the press at the time and propelled the Bonds into the public eye—which may have contributed to what came next.

Two years before, the Bonds had been contacted by an elderly Manchester woman, Patricia Kelley, who was concerned that an antique brooch she had given to her daughter-in-law had played a part in the woman’s recent death. After days spent interviewing relatives and researching family history, the Bonds returned to London with the brooch in their custody. Like so many cursed objects the Bonds had investigated over the years, the brooch might have remained in their sanctified storage unit if Kelley's daughter, Linda Hobbes, had not had her mother declared mentally incapable and placed in a care home, with Hobbes being made deputy of her mother's interests and affairs.

Hobbes filed a criminal complaint alleging that Q Bond had falsely and knowingly convinced Kelley that the brooch was cursed while profiting from her decision to give the brooch, which was valued at £145,000 as of 20--, to Q. Complicating matters was the Bonds' refusal to turn over the disputed property to the court on the grounds that court officials were unqualified to care for the brooch; they were ultimately fined for contempt of court, but the brooch remained safely locked away.

In the end, legal proceedings for _Hobbes v Bond_ stretched out over a year, and the verdict rested on a contentious interpretation of the laws governing consumer fraud and mediums in the UK put forth by the Bonds' barrister, noted legal scholar Olivia Mansfield, who specializes in freedom of conscience cases. Against Mansfield's advice, the Bonds elected not to countersue for defamation, although several sceptics associations have continued to rally around Hobbes as a critical figure in the modern anti-psychic endeavour.

Perhaps surprisingly for such high-profile figures, lawsuits against the Bonds are few and far between, numbering only five cases in the decades they have been practicing. Unlike most professional mediums, the Bonds don't charge consultation fees; they decide whether to take a case based purely on their sense of a petitioner’s character, though it helps if the Church will vouch for you. They rarely even accept monetary gifts for their assistance, although the status of those is not nearly as legally fraught as actually charging for their services would be. Though they live comfortably off of proceeds from speaking engagements and the odd request for Q or James to take up a guest professorship in religious studies at a nearby university, James and Q have been doing the thankless work of parapsychologists long before it paid dividends.

But perhaps most important to James and Q's continued success is the fierce loyalty they are afforded from the people whose cases they have taken on. In order to protect the Bonds' privacy, former clients are reluctant to even be interviewed about their paranormal experiences, much less sue. What they do have to say is characterized by staunch gratitude and deep respect. They describe the Bonds as competent and experienced, steadyingly composed, a refuge of last resort.

Clair Shipway of Wakefield, who contacted the Bonds in 20-- after seeing paranormal apparitions in her last two residences, says, "It's not just what they did about Mary's ghost. Mr. and Mr. Bond listened to me at a time when no one else would, at a time when even I thought I might be going mad. They saved my sanity, even before they saved my life."

– ♠ –

Q opens his eyes. The curtains have been pulled and it's almost full dark, but lamplight sends pain stinging through his skull. He's in a faintly musty bedroom and the door is cracked open; just beyond it, he can hear James, blessedly, wonderfully alive James, speaking in low, sharp tones to someone with a rolling Scottish brogue. He closes his eyes again and drifts back off.

Q opens his eyes again to fingers carding through his hair. He turns his head slightly and James's face comes into view, pale but lit gorgeously by the bedside lamp. He's lying on the bed next to Q, a tightness around his eyes that Q would smooth away with his fingers if consciousness didn't hurt so blasted much. When James notices that he's awake, the fingers in his hair still; Q scowls and gives his hand a tiny headbutt. It's easier for Q not to think about his vision of James in pain, James dead, when he can feel the warmth of his hand, the steady rhythm of his breath.

"I never should have brought you here," James says as he starts up again. There's a heavy distance in his words that Q doesn't like, but his voice is still low and his fingers are still gentle.

"It's not just me, is it," Q says.

"No," James says. "I… I feel it too. It's what we did here, all those years ago, it's finally come back for me. To take its due."

He closes his eyes and clear as anything Q can see his sixteen-year-old self overlaid on the man he has become. Q wants to gather him close, stretch through time and keep him safe from everything that is about to and already has happened to him, but he's not sure he can reach that far, and anyway James is saying, quickly, clipped, as if to get it over with, the past spilling out like a geyser, "You know that—a few months after my parents died, Hannes moved here to take guardianship of me. That his son came with him. And that I—" something rough catches in his voice and it makes Q's throat ache in sympathy— "idolized him. He was two years older than me, and I followed him everywhere. In everything. He taught me how to fight. How to drive. How to smoke. How to pick pockets.

"And you know that when I was fifteen, he developed an interest in the occult. And how I followed him there, too.”

Q has heard this story before, in dribs and drabs, narrated under the cover of blankets and darkness, a fragment here and there over years of marriage until the full picture unfolded itself to him like a slow-blooming flower. Q has heard this story before, but speaking is saving, and he lets it go on.

So James says:

"At first it was harmless. Spirit boards and biographies of Aleister Crowley and matching pentagram tattoos to piss off Hannes." James's left hand curls to fist the sheets, seemingly without thought, and Q knows that on that wrist is a faded tattoo of a pentagram that has since been elaborated into a small but ornate Seal of Solomon, though you can still pick out the original design if you look closely enough. "But he was clever, cleverer than me, and… relentless. He would fixate on something and— _excavate,_ go farther down and farther in until he knew everything, every speck of all there was to know… And I was so _blind_. He changed, right in front of me, there was—this wildness—like he found religion—like anything else stopped mattering to him—and this seed of cruelty, growing fat like a tumour."

He laughs self-consciously, a hurt displacement of breath against Q's collarbone. "With what he did, you might find it hard to believe, but he never used to be cruel. He liked secrets, that was all. For a while, it felt like our own conspiracy… We found a dead buck once and hauled it back to the chapel, lit candles, spoke words of power. Later I would find out that dogs had been going missing… a lamb, once… a neighbor girl's pet rabbit. He kept that side of his experimentation from me.

“It wasn't until I walked into the cellar and saw him crouched over the maid’s daughter with a knife that it hit me, how far we had gone. How much farther he'd have us go.

“And it was like diving in winter. It hurt. I'd known that what we were doing was real, that it had power—I'm not as alive to it as you but I could still feel it, a presence, an alien interest, we reached into the dark and something touched us back—but that was the first time it felt— _real_ , that it had _consequences_.” There is too much feeling warped into the grain of his voice, love and betrayal and confusion and a deep, abiding self-hatred. “Vesper, she was younger than we were. Her mother used to bring her around while she worked. She was smart—good at math. Quiet. Her dad kept bees—she would bring honey samples by sometimes. And he—looked at me, bloody up to the elbows, and smiled.” James closes his eyes, which aren't wet but still burn with desolation. His Adam's apple moves against Q's shoulder as he swallows. “Like he expected me to follow him here, too."

"You wouldn't have," Q says softly, because he knows hauntings when he sees them, and this is a corpse that has hung over his marriage bed for years. Decades.

"I thought about it,” James whispers.

"That's why it's called temptation," Q says gently.

"He was almost my brother," James says eventually, soft and hurt and bewildered. "He knew me better than anyone in the world. And he still thought I would…"

"You know," Q says, "that whatever was in that room at that point was not your brother."

James closes his eyes and Q wishes, more than anything, belief on him. James forges on clinically, speech still faster, jerkier, than his usual seductive drawl, like he’s counting every agonizing second spent telling this tale, like he wants to have stolen absolution without the pain of confession, "I tackled him—got the knife—he knocked me into a censer. Ash and blood everywhere. I don't… remember much about that. He hit something, hard enough to stun him for a moment, and I wasn't thinking. I was running on sheer instinct and… and primitive fear. I took Vesper with me. But I left him.

"We'd read stories about evocation gone wrong, I knew what would happen if I stole his sacrifice after he'd already promised some hell-beast dinner. I knew that if I interrupted, if I _robbed_ him of his… _victim_ , I might keep the entity from getting a foothold in the world, but that before that, It would turn on _him_. And I did it anyway." Despair glinting off his voice like sunlight through crystal. "I left him anyway, Q."

"You saved that girl's life."

"I could hear him screaming from the hall. I heard it… rip him apart, and the cat too, I guess, and I stood there, petrified, less than even a witness." His voice has gone dull and distant, like a man recalling a dream. "I could have come back for him. I _should_ have come back—"

 _"No,"_ Q snarls, and the fierceness of it seems to bring James back to himself.

Deliberately, James says, "The malice. The strength of that presence. Just a heartbeat in its penumbra altered me, tinted dark the way I saw the world. Like learning how a magic trick is done: once you've seen it, you can never unsee it. That kind of evil, that kind of _power_ … You were right. I'm out of my depth here. I never should have returned to this place."

"James, you can't leave this because of me—"

"It's not you," he says. "It’s not. The last time I was here… I almost signed away my soul. I _did_ kill my—kill my—and I'm stronger now." A kiss, so light against Q's hair it feels more like the idea of a kiss. "You've made me so much stronger. But I'll never be strong enough for this. For whatever we woke up here so many years and lives ago."

He takes a breath that's too even to be anything other than a ruthlessly quashed shuddering gasp. "I'll call Mallory, get the Church to take over. And we'll leave early tomorrow morning. I… don't want to risk you in the dark."

Q should protest. It may be arrogant to say that there's no one better equipped to handle something as monstrous, as vicious, as the thing James has described than his husband (and himself, of course), but it's also true. The whole town is buckling under the psychic pressure, and all it takes is one weak mind for the entity to infiltrate a host and escape these grounds. But Q’s world is poised on the brink of flames, and the forememory of James's screams is expectant in the air. Shamefully, selfishly, he is shaking with relief. He won't see James dead this week, or the next. "Okay," he says softly, and squashes down his conscience with the tremendous part of his heart that just wants James to _live_.

James clicks off the lamp and arranges himself under the covers with a stiff efficiency and no more words. It gets dark here, a deep, thick pitch that London's light pollution makes impossible, but Q isn't afraid, even though he knows what flourishes in the dark. James has his arms around him and he's radiating heat like a person-shaped sun and his crucifix is digging into his shoulder and there is no place safer in the world, in all the worlds. Q floats in the dark and listens to James's still-awake breathing until he gathers himself enough to say, "You're wrong, you know. You wouldn't have done it. Desperate or grieving or blinded or deluded, you would've done the right thing. In the end."

"You don't know that," James says, rubbed raw and tired.

"I'm the world authority on James Bond. My informed opinion trumps your informed opinion. You've been punishing yourself for something you didn't do. That you couldn’t do. For years."

That gets a weary huff of a laugh out of him, at least. "I've been punishing myself for… Q, I…" Stronger, but stricken: "You can't imagine what that room felt like, like everything you'd ever wanted was hanging in the air, waiting for you. Like every wound you'd ever taken and every hurt you'd ever have would be—not just soothed—undone. Power and chocolate-dipped strawberries and pure heroin in the vein. All those stupid fantasies I had when we'd started this—the stupid wisp of an idea that I could—" He swallows. Q's fingers flutter up to James's throat and rub gently, a reflex; clearly this isn't a pain he can soothe away with ginger tea and a massage. When he goes to pull away though, James's fingers trap his and he pulls their interwoven hands against his clavicle, like he’s drawing strength from them, enough to continue: "See them again. Be… a child again."

His fingers tighten on Q's. "Desire like that… it's ravaging. It was years before I could manage to want something in a way that didn't feel like a pale imitation of what I could have had."

"When was that?" Q asks quietly.

"I was standing in St. Paul's Cathedral and I saw a boy who burned brighter than the light of the world," James says, and for a long time Q just listens to the sound of him existing, watches his chest move in the dim light of the bedside lamp, before he slips from wakefulness for the third time that day.

– ♠ –

EDINBURGH, Scotland--A fire of unknown origin at a remote estate near Fort William killed a visiting Austrian 19-year-old and badly injured a local woman.

Franz Oberhauser, 19, had been living in Scotland for five years with his father. The Oberhausers had moved from Tyrol, Austria in order to foster the orphaned child of family friends.

Oberhauser was pronounced dead at the scene.

Also caught in the fire was the young daughter of Marie Lynd, who is currently in serious condition at Belford Hospital. Lynd had been working at the manor as a maid since 19--.

The fire was contained to the cellar and back stairs of Skyfall manor, a structure dating back to the 17th century. Scottish Fire and Rescue officials estimate that the fire began around midnight and continued to burn until sunrise seven hours later.

The fire caused no structural damage, nor was it in danger of spreading to the neighboring town of Glencoe Village, according to SFR Station Manager Simon Munro.

Foul play is not suspected at this time.

– ♠ –

—dark water rushing in—

– ♠ –

This is how the temptation of Q Bond goes:

Q wakes, not with a gasp or with a start but with a tiny flinch that makes James _murr_ softly and tuck him closer into the bulwark of his body. His heart is in his throat and every time he blinks he sees James underwater, holding on and holding on and holding on until he can't anymore, and then struggling for air and mercy when there is none of either to be had. His pale hand around his own throat. Dark water rushing in.

Dreams. For now, still only dreams. Q breathes.

He can feel proof of life where James has smooshed Q's face to his heart, in the slow pulse of a man without nightmares. Q hasn't been… sleeping well. Even before Scotland, even in their house that’s warded and blessed with every rite known to man and a few that aren’t, for months he's been dreaming of death, the putting out of the golden creature currently lying beside him and drooling into his hair. James takes Q's death-visions with a hefty grain of salt, and Q hates it, hates _him_ a little. A vision during a temporary link with an inhuman mind turned into the odd frisson of apprehension here and there turned into recurring dream turned into every night, for weeks it's been every night, every night he fails James. And now, whenever he closes his eyes; when he buries his face in his hands to scrub the nightmare away, there is a corpse floating in the water, and a whispering coming from the walls. Whatever is coming for them no longer needs the psychic nakedness of sleep to sink its fangs into Q. It seeps just under the surface of the world now, almost as real as reality. Just a blink away from _being_.

The dark is drawing near now.

James accepts the possibility of his death because he has _no idea_ , no idea how important he is, how his death would be a wound opening in the world, and not just Q's world, either. He can't explain it, can't put into words the sliver-peek-glimpses he gets of the— _cosmic order_ or whatever, their places in the bloody universe. A rockslide caused by kicking a pebble out of place. Samson's broken pillars sending the whole temple tumbling down. A tapestry woven against the dark without its selvage thread, unraveling, tangling, coming utterly undone. A world without James is one empty of meaning, absent of light. On his own, Q’s not enough, he can't bear the weight of the sky alone. You can't make fire with only steel.

James is stubborn, James is good. James has promised that they’ll leave in the morning. James has chosen safety, for Q, for Q’s sake. But still, Q dreams of drowning.

Q gives himself a moment to feel more than listen to the heartbeat resting under his cheek, a moment that stretches into every moment like honey falling from a spoon. What he does next is stupid, and inevitable. He knows who he is, which is someone incapable of doing anything else.

Before he begins, Q casts anchors for himself, lifelines he can use to force himself back to the real, one in the empty spaces in the manor where a boy’s parents ought to be and one in Irene with her worry and her homebrewed ale and one in Solomon, who Q can sense is curled up in the drawing room, tucked into herself ouroboros-style, as cats do. Farther away, faint signals like distant buoys: his friends, his brothers, his awful old cat. Like Odysseus, he keeps himself tethered to safety, with lines of human feeling instead of rope. But the strongest anchor is moored in the man next to him: warm and vital and utterly _his_. They are caught heart-and-heart, him and James, they are so tightly entangled that they have no choice but to protect each other, and that's the best, the strongest ward he knows.

Safe in the harbor of James's existence, Q sets aside his psychic armor and lays himself bare, exposed, cold, but like this he is alert to the smallest disturbance, the slightest puff of ghostly breath. His husband’s presence blunts the pain of this, of making himself into a raw trembling nerve, and he in turn will guard against any hint of ill intent towards James. Nothing will steal him away like so much wasting time while Q takes the watch. Nothing is strong enough for that.

From far away, he hears his name.

Like the warning buzz of an electric fence, the hum running through the house which was nearly beyond even Q's perception hardens and tempers into the jagged shard of _his name_ , in a voice he has memorized, in a voice he loves. James, just outside the door, just down the hall, just out of sight. James, a slight note of amusement coloring his tone, the mischievousness he gets when he wants to play, _bel canto, vibrato,_ all woodsmoke and warm things. _Q_ , as tantalizing a trail to follow as burnt sugar wafting from a kitchen window, as will o’wisps waltzing in the dark. The ghosts up here have picked up a trick or two from the local fae, are slipperier than the city-spirits Q and James usually deal with. Q wraps himself in True James’s scent and warmth, a shield against temptation.

The walls vibrate with a frisson of irritation, and the voice changes mid-call. Q’s inbuilt need to find it, fix it, to fight off every single thing that could mean _that voice_ harm, sharpens. Fuck.

 _Q!_ Not panicked but sharp and taut as a blade. It’s the way James says his name when shaking in what someone who is less of a spiritual wrecking ball might call fear. Q casts out for True James’s mind beside him, but though he knows his husband is right there, that his hair (short but surprisingly soft, going grey at the edges, he’s so delightfully vain about it) is tickling his chin and his pulse (each beat a throb of light at the edge of Q’s perception, like ripples in a dark pond) is immutable under his collarbone, trying to latch on to that knowledge is lying trying to catch water, to catch shadow. James is there, not hurt, not calling, and yet Q is not comforted. A curtain has fallen between him and the material world, and Q gropes for the warmth of his husband beside him and comes up lacking.

And it’s a trick, he knows it’s a trick, he _knows_ that the great lump is right next to him, restless in his parents’ bed because when Q had collapsed he’d wanted to get him on something soft and horizontal as quickly as possible and so had foregone the stairs up to his own bedroom for this chamber full of feather down and ghosts. It’s a trick, and it is working, because the Spirit of Skyfall understands something about Q that James has always struggled to, as wonderfully, obstinately grounded a creature as he is. That the hard thing for Q has never been the Second Sight. That the skill he has spent his life struggling with is his ability to see not the Otherworld but what is right in front of him.

 _Q!_ Heat and blood in that beloved voice now, iron and agony. He should wake James. He should wake _himself_. He should roll over to bury his face in James’s neck and wait until dawn. He should do a thousand things. 

What he does is think, again, of Odysseus.

He thinks of the _Odyssey_ , of the old tales; the damned, and the drowned. He thinks of beeswax and a kind of music only audible in a storm. He thinks of the man-of-twists-and-turns, the man curious enough to heed a siren song, arrogant enough to actually try it, and clever enough to lash himself to the mast first. He thinks of _hamartia_ , fatal flaws. He thinks of his own vices, the worst and most lethal of which is love.

 _Q—!_ and then the sound of someone choking. Drowning.

He throws back the bedcovers and follows the smell of saltwater. 

Q has an anchor in his heart tethering him to the light and conviction that he will not—is incapable of—letting the man on the other side of that line come to harm. It wreathes him in calm, girds him for battle. Like drifting down a slow stream, he follows the current, its dark magnetism; up the stairs, along the hall. Like rising slowly to the surface, he comes to realize that he is standing in front of a mirror over a sink, his own pale face luminous against the night.

A slow squeak as the bathtub’s tap turns on, and suddenly it’s not his face in the mirror but someone else’s, someone young but with a horrible red-raw pucker of a scar carving through his right eye and cheekbone, someone with a white, cold fist clenched around his husband’s heart.

The image cracks around his gasp—

A blue flood of pain and the mirror is gone, he’s slumped on his back, still there but somewhere else. Cold porcelain under his back. Water soaking his clothes as the bathtub fills, and he reaches, reaches for the place where James is tied to him, and his grasp closes around water and air-

In the gasp before he sinks below the water, he realizes that it was perhaps not James who’d needed every protection Q could bring to bear after all.

Love and temptation. Dark water rushing in.

– ♠ –

Even though it had long been hounded by neglect into a mere attic by the time his parents died and _he_ came bringing his glorious gifts of cigarettes and teenage freedom and dark magic, when James meets his erstwhile brother in dreams it’s in the playroom. Chipped-paint rocking horse under the dormer window. A plain ship in a bottle, the kind his father used to make almost idly, beside the battered chessboard on which Kincade had taught him.

Q would probably have hypotheses about it, about the things his mind associates with childhood, about the story he tells himself _about_ himself and when his innocence had truly slipped away, whatever his angry, sullen teenage self might have believed about what his parents’ death had done to him. But in spite of the odd golden moment when their souls overlap, he isn’t Q, and so instead of theories he’s catalogued every weapon at hand, both physical and spiritual, in the moment he turns around and meets his cool, burning eyes. He’ll tell Q about this and hear his theories if he wakes up. When he wakes up.

“Hello, James,” he says, and God, oh God, he looks the same, exactly the same. Handsome and bright and two years older than James had been and everything he’d wanted to grow into. James glances down at his own hands. The scars and marks of a lifetime of physical labor to scrape a living together in between bouts with the forces of evil are gone. His skin is clear and his palms are—rough, but in the everyday way of a teenage sailor and rock—climber, not in the bloody, fierce way of a man who is used to clinging to life with his bare hands and not letting go, not letting go.

He says, soft, soft, like speaking to a wild animal in a way that soothes yourself more than it, “Franz.”

His smile cold and wicked like an unsheathed blade. “Ah, so you remember. I wasn’t sure. You never speak my name anymore.”

“Names have power.”

“Ha. Don’t you think you’ve robbed me of quite enough power?”

“I robbed you of nothing that you had not already stolen,” he says. His words feel thick and clumsy on his tongue.

“No regret,” Franz muses. “You killed your brother—”

Q’s voice, sure and unbending as religion, shimmers into his head— _You know that whatever was in that room at that point was not your brother_ —”I didn’t kill you,” James snaps, which is not quite the same thing but as close as he can get to believing in this moment. “All the pain, all the torment you’ve endured since then—you brought it on yourself. You knew the cost. You _knew_ the cost. And you still tried to—to offer up someone else’s life—an _innocent person’s_ life—and now you’re doing it again, visiting _your_ horror on these people. Grow up, Franz. Take responsibility for your suffering for once in your misbegotten death.”

“Ah,” Franz sighs. There’s an unaccountable pleasure in it. “So is this the great James Bond one hears about in the Worlds Beyond? The exorcist, the medium, the defender you’ve become. How has it been, _life?_ How has it tasted?”

“Sweeter than the cup you drank from,” James says coolly. “Is that why you’ve brought me here? To take back the life you think I shouldn’t have gotten?”

“What?” Franz seems genuinely startled. “No, of course not, James. You’re asking the wrong question. You can’t think I brought you here to _kill_ you.”

“Someone does.”

“Ah. Your handsome husband. Yes, well. The visions he’s been getting would give that impression. But no, dear brother, I never wanted to kill you. Death is so—irrevocable, and I know that better than most. I just wanted a portion of revenge. I just wanted you to suffer a little.”

“You don’t think I’ve suffered every day? Wishing I’d been faster to catch on or a stronger summoner than you? Wishing I’d been clever enough to save you?” The way Q would have.

_The way you would have._

“Not enough,” Franz says. “Not nearly enough. But you will.”

The certainty of him shakes through James. “So what are you going to do to me?” he says. He’s not true-seeing like Q, but his psyche is hardier than most. Still, he knows the strength of that thing to which Franz reached out decades ago. He’d interrupted its passage into this world, but dreams are not quite of one or the other, and he won’t know for sure how powerful it is here until it has him gasping and dying on the floor.

Franz—he _laughs_ , damn him. “That’s still the wrong question, James!”

“Then tell me the right one or set your dogs or demons or what-bloody-ever of hell upon me,” he snaps. “Anything would be less painful than this.”

“James, James. You could never really see the truth, could you? You always needed a guide. First me, then that pretty boy. Tell me, James… if I never meant to kill you, why has your dear husband been dreaming of your death?”

No. A shock of chill pain, like someone has caught a fishhook in his heart and twisted. “Franz,” he says, “what have you done?”

That’s still the wrong question. Years ago, staring at Vesper’s puddle of dark hair and the blood clinging to her fingers, her face, he’d said those words in that inflection, and they had seemed insufficient then, small against the horror of blood and darkness gathering at the door. But it’s different now. Now—

“Franz,” he says, his dream-voice going hoarse with horror, raw with black, frozen rage, “what have you done to _Q_?”

“I finished,” Franz hissed, as wild and unhinged as James himself, “what I _started.”_

_“What have you done?!”_

And he’s standing in the upstairs bath—before, the one he and Franz had shared—further back, _big enough to go swimming in,_ his mum had used to complain about it—and Q is in the bathtub, still in the pyjamas James had changed him into but soaked, submerged, flailing for breath but catching only brackish water in his lungs, struggling against the nothing that is pinning him down, thrashing and wild-eyed against the water entombing him, _dying_ —

—James makes a noise that is inhuman, less even than bestial, and lunges for his drowning heart—

—and catapults upright from what takes him a precious moment to realize is his parents’ bed. He loses delicate, necessary moments when his coordination deserts him and he forgets he’s tangled in the sheets—as he yanks them off he runs one hand over Q’s side, feels it cooling fast, he was here just a minute ago, the two of them parted by mere _moments_ , and he runs, and he runs to close that distance between them, that gap of seconds that might still be far enough to separate them entirely. Up the stairs, the old wood brutally cold against his feet, he stumbles hard once and catches himself on the banister, doesn’t pause to get his bearings, when his feet fail him he uses his grip on the rail to haul himself upward—the pull towards Q is as inexorable as magnetism, as gravity, as freefall. He hurtles toward him like he’s being acted upon by an outside force, not his own desperation and fear.

Light spills from beneath the bathroom door, sickly, cold. He slams into it hard enough that he feels the impact in the back of his teeth, but it’s locked with supernatural force. Snarling, he slams his hands against it purely to feel the force of his protest bruise his palms, then puts the full weight of his body behind his shoulder.

And again. And again—

_Not_

_like_

_this—_

—the door splinters in. 

Q drifts, pale and drained, beneath the bathtub’s dark waters. The fight in James’s dream is gone—he’s still, so still—

But if Franz thinks James will just lie down and accept the violent wrenching-apart of himself and Q, he has no concept of the workings of his brother’s heart now after all.

He gets his arms around Q and hauls him out onto the cold marble floor, a wet tangle of limbs and hair, presses fingers to his pulse point even though he knows what he’ll find, and starts to breathe for him. He doesn’t need a Queen song to keep pace, just times his motions to the frantic tempo of his own voice; he doesn’t think he could make sense of music right now anyway. Don’t you (compression), don’t you (compression) dare (compression). For once (compression) in your (compression) life (compression) wake up (compression) when I ask— (compression, breath, breath) please (compression), please (compression), please (compression). Don’t leave. You can’t leave me. Please (compression).

You hear me? You’re too bloody strong to go out like this. You’re too fucking stubborn—

His whole world narrows. His own voice fades out. His hands and arms ache from the force of the impact and somewhere a light has gone out in the world, but he can do this all night, longer. It’s only right, anyway, that he share his breath and life with his husband. Q _is_ his heart. Q is his lungs. And he can do this for the rest of his life.

Q. Q, love, please. For me.

Under his hands, Q gasps back to life.

– ♠ –

_Christ_ , everything hurts.

Q spends the first few instants of life, again, mostly unconscious, coughing water onto black-veined marble. He comes awake mid-heave and takes a sluggish moment to register familiar arms wrapped around him so tightly it hurts and the worst psychic hangover he’s ever had in his life. More painful than that is his chest, which feels like it’s been crushed in. Even more painful than that is the shame of having walked right into the spirit’s trap. Some medium. 

(If James dies here, it will be because of him.)

James takes his pulse with an apocalyptic urgency. When Q tries to speak, his voice is waterlogged and raw. James shushes him, even though he ought to know better. “You—all right—?”

“Am _I_ —” James makes an unhinged noise that might, under dire circumstances, pass for a laugh, “Q—my dead foster brother just _killed you_ —"

“Yes… that’s a… problem.” With impeccable melodrama, the old, exposed lightbulbs flicker, then plunge them into pitch darkness. “But I don’t think… it’s the only one.”

In the distance, in the fragmentary flicker of a past, Q can hear someone laughing, the boisterous, cruel laughter of someone having achieved a victory they were half-sure would never come. “He wants you—to suffer. James, he hates you… so _much_.” He tries to form words around the _presence_ he can feel now, so clear, the world rubbing raw and painful at his senses like the clouded glass between him and whatever what was trapped here has shattered and left him bloody, the thing swelling floors below them like a bubble of darkness about to pop, a tumor in the fabric of the universe. “There’s something… something—”

“Shh, breathe. Do you know what he’s planning?” Q shakes his head, dizzy. “No,” James says to himself. “That’s the wrong question again. He let me save you. He wanted you dead, but… he didn’t need you to stay dead.”

The ground shifts under their feet. James can feel it this time and he staggers. It’s getting cold now. And there’s a feeling—like pins everywhere—an oppressive horror that he feels bear down harder on him every time he draws in air, like slow poisoning by gas. “James—the demon he summoned—”

“He needed a sacrifice,” James breathes. Around them, the walls begin to tremble.

Everything hurts, but when James wraps a hand around his wrist and pulls him upright, Q goes. Half-carried, half-carrying, they _run_ , they tear through the manor like their lives depend on it, which may not be strictly true because there’s no way they can outrun the thing that’s waking, slowly, in the foundations. Still, they’re supernaturalists who are in over their heads; running seems like the most sensible thing to do. The ground quakes underfoot with a violence that, were it physical in nature, would bring the whole structure crashing down on their heads. As they hammer down the steps and Q savagely beats the spinning world into submission, James pants out, “We need to stop him,” like an _idiot._

Q doesn’t ask if he means his foster brother or the demon; at this point, they’re interchangable. “ _How?!_ ” he cries out. “We can’t call out—the Church will never come in time—”

“Look around you, Q!” James shouts, partly to be heard over the grinding agony of the stone walls shifting in ways they’re not meant to and partly in pure frustration. “If I can feel it, you can feel it—”

“I’m not saying what’s happening here is _good_ , but not even a team of cardinals could beat back a fully awakened demon—”

They hit the ground floor. Abruptly, James lets go of his wrist and Q staggers, suddenly aware of how much he was depending on that familiar warmth just to remain upright. “You’re right. We have to stop it here, before it’s at full strength.” They’re not dead yet, he means, which means the Thing doesn’t have the power to kill them yet. They stand in the heartbeat between sacrifice and awakening where they can turn It back. The stairs empty out into the northwest corner; James glances at the main entrance with something like longing, and then in the other direction, where the priest hole and cellar are accessible through a hidden set of stairs in the pantry. “Q—you need to leave.”

“Are you fucking stupid?” Q snaps, astonished.

“No. Yes. Listen, Q, someone has to hold him off. He wants me, you know he does, you told me so. He’ll let you go as long as I stay.”

Q gapes furiously. It’s the best he can manage. They’re a team, James knows they’re a team. Partners in everything, the two of them against the world. They promised the rest of their lives to each other, and if they die here—they’ll do that together, too. He’s opened his mouth and is working up a righteous fury, when James leans in, presses his forehead to Q’s, and whispers, more breath than sound, _“Q—the boot.”_

It… could work. It’s the only thing that might work, actually. Clever, insane James. Q swallows painfully and then says, arguing against their (and possibly northwestern Europe’s) only chance at surviving the night, in a brief, weak moment when the only thing that matters is his own heart, “But James—my dreams.”

“They’re not real, Q,” James says, not gently, but over the years Q has learned to read gentleness in his roughness.

“These things have a way of becoming realer than they were. You know that. You _know_ that,” Q says desperately.

“Listen to me,” James says fiercely. The house moans. They’re out of time. “ _Listen to me_ for once in your life, you stubborn bastard. A long time ago I asked if you believed if fate, and you said something sweet about choices and music.”

“Yes,” he whispers.

“It all ends up in the same place, Q. Fate isn’t a crazed spirit’s master plan and it isn’t just our choices. It’s who we are. It’s the way that sometimes there’s only one thing we could ever do.” He’d walked up to him in St. Paul’s Cathedral and asked if he was an artist. “ _This…_ it’s not my fate, Q. _You_ are. You always have been. I’ll come back. Have a little faith.”

“James, we are _minutes_ from Hell, I’m not sure I can.”

“Have faith in me.” James’s hands work at the nape of his neck and a weight settles over his neck. Dazed, Q looks down and sees James’s burnished-gold crucifix, the one he wears not out of religious but romantic belief. He reads in it the hours those hands have spent working the metal over gently with jewelry cleaner, the long passages through the darkness, and the future. He reads in it a promise to return for it. “If nothing else. Have faith in _me.”_

“Okay,” Q whispers, and James kisses him, and it’s another one of those perfect moments when there is nothing between their souls at all.

He doesn’t remember them breaking apart, just the quick caress of James’s thumb across his cheekbone, the searching fierceness with which James memorizes his face. “Go,” he says sharply, and Q goes, sprinting through the last few rooms and feeling the house tremble in protest as he fumbles with the locked door. Years ago, they’d done battle with an inhuman spirit who had become one with the house he was haunting. This isn’t like that; there are still traces of James, traces of those who loved him, in the walls, and Skyfall fights back. The lock unclasps, and Q bursts out into the chill air, the cold burning his lungs, the absence of James like a wound in his side, but he ignores all of that, he shudders through it like the point of a spear, and reaches for his husband’s ridiculous car. 

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

Not long after the incident at the Cobb house, Q agreed to a formal interview. He met with reporters at a tidy, impersonal tea house in Marylebone. Over steaming cups of builder’s brew, he answered questions about the life of a paranormal expert and some of his more infamous cases for nearly two hours. He seemed tired. 

One interviewer, overeager and new to the world of possessions and poltergeists, asked a question which, in hindsight, may be considered inappropriately familiar: Q, knowing what you do about the worlds beyond, are you afraid of death?

Clear-eyed and crisp, he said, “No. I know firsthand. There are far worse things out there than death.”

– ♠ –

It takes Q a little under twenty seconds to get from the stairs to the main entrance. That’s how long James has to breathe and steel himself before the door shudders to a close behind him and the world— _warps_ , and suddenly he’s not where he was an instant before. He’s still standing in Skyfall, but… not _his_ Skyfall. This one writhes and bucks at his touch. He breathes the thick, claustrophobic air of the priest hole and feels the water Q drowned in lap at his bare feet. He stands under the high windows of the playroom but no light comes through them, and there is blood on the walls of the cellar that became Franz’s tomb. It’s everything he’s ever feared and hated about this place overlapping itself, all the dark faces of Skyfall crammed into one place, a blur of loss and sorrow and pain and guilt smeared across his senses. He turns around. Franz, smiling, whole and handsome, watches him. There’s a hazy, doubled quality to him, like he’s more reflection than man. “All right,” he says. “I’m here. Do your worst.”

“James, James! It’s always about the _fight_ with you. I’ve made it all right, little brother. We can stop fighting now. I _forgive_ you.”

“Not ten minutes ago you told me you wanted to make me suffer in ways a lifetime of grief and regret haven’t,” James pointed out.

“I was angry! I was out of my mind. Now, with dear Q—”

 _“Don’t you say his name,”_ James snarled, on the other side of feral.

Franz smiled the annoying, superior smile that James had almost forgotten had used to make him feel so small. “All right. With _your dear husband_ ’s life fueling the summoning… there’s so much more room to breathe now. I can be magnanimous. Freedom does that to a person, opens up interior space.” Horrifyingly, he adds, “I don’t hate you, James, I never have. I _love_ you. I’m doing this _for_ you. You’ll see, when the doors open and the darkness comes rushing out… you’ll love it too. I still remember how much _fun_ we had, after all.”

“Fun?” he says, soft.

A blink, and Franz is smiling out at him from the mirror above the sink. He’s crisper now, in reflection form, growing more solid and real all the time. For all his talk of freedom, he is trapped by the physical presence of Skyfall as surely as James is, he’s caught by the sticky materiality of the real. As lethal as he is, as demonic as he has become, he’s still bound by the rules of the mortal realm. For now.

They have a moment, just a moment, to act. Stall, James tells himself. Give Q the time he needs.

Hell, that’s his whole life story. He can do this. 

Franz’s teeth are very, very white. _“Fun._ I remember you, you know. The person you are, not the person you’re pretending to be.I know you, James, better than _him_ , better than the motley crew of priests and possession-chasers you call friends… I know your secret, that you’re not like them”

“What? I’m _like you?_ I’m _nothing_ like you.”

“It’s not like I had to force you along in our little adventures, you know. You were always so eager. Always pushing me, impetuous, racing to get ahead. Little brother’s complex, I suppose.”

“I am _not_ ,” James says, with a cold counterpoint to the heat that had flared through him when Franz had shaped his lying lips around Q’s name, “your brother.”

“Then what _are_ you?” A blink, and Franz’s voice is coming off the stones of Skyfall itself. James thinks he can see the contours of his face bulging from the stone. “Not the hero your husband thinks you are. Not the white wizard of Mayfair. All these games, you think I can’t tell when you’re playing? You think I can’t tell how much you _wanted_ , right before you destroyed my ritual and left me for dead? That I don’t know what you were thinking when we started all this?” James can almost hear his mother’s voice now. He wishes desperately for Q, who is the strong one, who is the brave one. Who would turn down temptation without wavering, solid as stone, as Skyfall itself. “You are greed and gluttony, you are the thing that feeds in the dark. Like me. Like _It_.” His heart beats to the tempo of Franz’s frenetic words, and he wishes it would stop, it would all stop. “And when we’re free from here, we’ll swallow the world. You and I forever. Kings of everything.”

He can picture it, is the thing. Fire and blood and perfect, luxurious pleasure. The agonies of a mortal life bricked over in brimstone. The end of loss. The end of grief. His mother’s mezzosoprano, his father’s hand on his shoulder. Q’s lips on his.

The dark in his mind fades back.

“Franz,” he says, mind clear for the first time since he received that damned letter, or maybe much longer, “I’d rather burn first.”

The whole building _screams_ , ripples in an agony James has only seen once before, when he took Vesper and left Franz lying on the floor of the cellar, a raw noise of betrayal right before the scream shifted to one of unending pain. The walls shift rapidly—the dirt walls of the tunnel where he buried his parents in his mind to the wood slats of his childhood playtimes to the tile of the bathroom where he nearly lost the life he’d built for himself. _“Why?”_ Franz demands. _“What is so much better than everything you’ve ever wanted?”_

“You’re asking the wrong question,” James says. “What you _should_ be asking is—where is Q?”

– ♠ –

Possessions, hauntings, curses—they’re like spiritual disease, mold growing over the soul, bacterial shadow-spores multiplying and being fruitful until Hell has colonized the world. Some infections are too big for holy water and a faith healer, but most incursions between the spirit realm and the material world are solved with a blessing and the placebo effect. Sometimes a specialist is required—this is where Q and James come in, armed with research, skill, experience, and the full backing of the Church of England. Sometimes you need an exorcism or some such thing—these established rituals collect strength from the way history has trod well-worn grooves into them, but really, what’s important is the presence of belief, in a higher power or simply in the enduring goodness of humanity. Faith is a sterilizer.

But it’s not the only one.

Outside, Q wires the last block of C-4 to the external gas line.

– ♠ –

EDINBURGH, Scotland--An explosion rocked an isolated village and destroyed a local family estate early on Saturday morning.

Though the fire has not spread, Scottish Fire and Rescue continue to battle the blaze that engulfed Skyfall manor shortly before dawn.

The Skyfall estate is no stranger to tragedy; owned by the Bond family since 1633, this is the second fire on the premises in less than twenty-five years. In 19--, a fire claimed the life of one visitor and severely injured another. 

Safety and resilience expert Mallory Franks speculated that faulty wiring was responsible for both incidents, over twenty years apart.

When asked about casualties, the station manager reported _(continued on page 4)_

– ♠ –

The first blast blows him off his feet and into the wall of what has suddenly solidified into the cellar. Of course, the cellar. In the sudden orange light caused by the blazing ground floor, he takes in the wall where Vesper’s blood had been smeared, the scorch mark in the corner where he’d knocked over the candle. His hearing trickles back slowly. He can’t hear Franz anymore, screaming or raging or otherwise, and he thinks he ought to mourn. But he _can_ hear the ravenous hunger of the fire overhead, and he’s already spent years and years mourning the boy who showed him that life went on after death. Ashes drift down and James scrabbles for the concealed door into the underground passage before he joins them. He’s made a promise.

Franz had always lived too much in the past. He’d never understood what James had, from the time he was eleven years old.

Failing all else, you could always burn it all down.

The tunnel belches its contents back onto the earth a little over a mile away from the manor. On a good day, he can manage that in just over six minutes. It’s not a good day; though the fire hasn’t caught up to him yet, the air’s still faintly white with smoke and he can feel himself becoming light-headed, black specks he’s not sure are soot or oxygen deprivation dancing at the corners of his vision. When he stumbles, he slams a hand, hard, into the dirt-stone wall and uses it to push himself onward. He hadn’t told Q, though of course that was no guarantee that he doesn’t already know, about the old but still full canisters of fuel hanging by the kitchen door. That’s the thing about first blasts; they’re usually followed by a second. 

James runs for his goddamn life and he can feel the walls heat around him, become first warning-warm and then melting-hot, his vision narrows until the light of the fire behind him is almost irrelevant because he can barely see the shape of the passageway, is ploughing blindly toward the dim hole at the center of his sight. His lungs burn alive behind him. And as the walls grow hotter, the world grows darker. That doesn’t seem quite right, he thinks, but he sets it aside to run harder, run hotter, to outrun his past and catch up to his future, to blaze past all the thorny anchors this place has still embedded in his flesh. One by one, he lets the ghosts go, and feels lighter, fleeter, as they peel away from him. Goodbye, Vesper. Goodbye, Franz. Goodbye, Mum. Goodbye, Dad.

Goodbye, James Bond, you miserable, wretched soul. Hello, James Bond. Hello.

He hurls himself through the open entrance to air and sky just in time to see a gout of flame follow him out. That would be the fuel canisters, then. On his back, coughing out what feels like sparks, he tries to orient his eyes toward the great awful light streaking the sky with orange and red, the colors of his whole childhood charring and peeling away, all the good parts and bad parts alike. It takes him a moment to register that he’s facing the wrong direction to be looking at the manor burning.

The light on his left; it’s not Skyfall. It’s the sunrise.

James rolls achily to his feet and stumbles more than strides back toward the front entrance.

He’s not sure why he doesn’t just stay down and sleep for seven years, at least not until his hearing, scared shy by the second blast, tiptoes back and brings the faint sound of someone calling his name. It’s hurt and desperate and scared and James would follow that voice anywhere, he’d answer that call if he _were_ dead and buried under the ruins of Skyfall, and come to think of it, maybe it is his ghost that creeps painfully toward the triple lights of the sun, Skyfall aflame, and Q. But the way Q’s voice shifts towards unutterable relief at some point makes him fairly certain that he has in fact survived this round with the forces of darkness. It’s intuition more than sight that tells him when it’s okay to slump forward, and sure enough, Q’s arms are there, waiting to catch him.

Gradually, he becomes aware of Q’s anxious hands fluttering over his burned and cinder-y face, steady words over a steady heart. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, you made it, I’ve got you now, I’ve got you. James mutely turns himself over in Q’s hands and leans back against his heart, his tender, aching heart, to watch the dawn.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: A Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

James is packed full of tales about his supernatural exploits, solo and partnered, though it takes some coaxing to get him going; indeed, the effort one has to put in to get anything out of the man is half the fun of his storytelling. Between the Black Dogs of Cornwall and the White Ladies of Wessex, running beneath all his stories is a common thread of loneliness. Though the Bonds are far from Britain’s only famous, infamous, or semi-infamous ghost-hunters, there is a long and troubled history between most of the major players on the paranormal stage: love affairs, jinxes, jobs gone wrong, even the odd blood feud or two.

For James, at least, his work has always been wrapped up with loneliness. “When I was young, I saw something I couldn’t explain. I used to try, but most people I met had no frame of reference for what I was describing. It wasn’t their fault; they just couldn’t picture it. Eventually I met people who lived in the spaces adjacent to what I saw, but by then I had learned to keep my secrets my own. It wasn’t until years later that I met someone who was both live there and knew how to listen. Someone who had seen something _he_ couldn’t explain. Someone who understood when I told him about what _I_ had seen.”

“So what did you do next?” I ask him.

“I married him,” James says.

– ♠ –

Years ago—years before he walked into his cellar and came face-to-face with a demon—James Bond saw something inexplicable.

When he’d told Kincade about it later, the man had just wiped at his red, exhausted eyes and told him he was overtired. When he’d told Hannes about it, his foster father’s mouth had tightened and he’d discreetly inquired into child psychologists in Edinburgh. When he’d told Franz about it, the boy had rolled his eyes and asked him, supercilious, whether he wasn’t a little old to have imaginary friends.

But James _knew_ that when he was eleven years old, standing by his mother’s hospital bed as his Great-Aunt Charmain signed the paperwork to turn off the life support, he’d seen an angel.

He told Q about Franz eight months into their relationship. But it was a month and a half later, when he told Q about the angel and he nodded, solemnly, and made him a strong cup of Assam breakfast tea, that he’d known he was going to marry him.

– ♠ –

Rude though it might be, they don’t stick around to be interrogated by the horde of arson investigators surely descending upon the mansion now. “This looks like a problem for Mansfield,” James had said, his eyes wearily tracing the blue lights flashing menacingly toward them, and Q had bundled him up in the back of their slightly singed car and taken them back to the inn to reclaim their bags and then straight out of town as fast as they can manage, just like they’d planned, like in between deciding to leave and actually leaving an incredibly powerful demon hadn’t just tried to eat the world. They must have been a sight in the small hours of the morning, one half-drowned and one half-burned, Q still in his wet nightclothes and James’s sleep shirt all but falling off where it’s been charred at the seams. Once they’re a few good miles out of town, they move to change into slightly-less-alarming normal-people clothes.

James pops the boot, much lighter absent of most of their emergency equipment, and stops. “Q,” he says, somehow managing to sound more tired than he has all night. Q peeks over and presses his fist into his mouth with shocked relief. Solomon blinks her milky ghost-eyes at them and stretches, a long elegant arch of her spine, before she saunters up to where James’s hand is lax on the door and sort of half-nudges half-phases through him for pets.

“Oh, good,” Q says, “I wasn’t sure she made it out of the fire. Who’s a smart little kitty? Who is, who?”

James opens his mouth—and closes it. “If she takes a ghost shit in the car I’m tossing her out the window,” he tells Q wearily, which is the same golden rule that Gideon lives by, so Q nods acceptingly and gets to work coddling… not his husband, who nearly died saving the world, but Franz’s dead cat.

James watches this and feels something terribly warm and inappropriately tolerant roil in his chest. He would love to say that it’s a conscious decision to return to normality, a compromise he makes with the gravity of the situation out of love for Q, but it’s not, it’s instinctual, it’s easy. Q will be Q and James will love him for it and there’s precious little more to explain about it. The truth of it is that when someone like Q loves you, you don’t ask why. You just cling to the safety of it and ride it to shore.

Besides, it’s not like James doesn’t have plenty of his own follies. Q drives another twenty minutes, which is roughly how long it takes before James feels recovered enough to fuss at him until Q pulls over and exasperatedly but warmly agrees to turn over the wheel. Truthfully neither of them should be driving but both of them ignore this. Q tucks himself into James’s right side and quietly soaks up his heat and aliveness. It’s a good thing he can drive with one hand.

As they drive past Dumfries, Q finally loses the silent argument they’ve been having with each other and speaks first. “I’m sorry. For going off on my own,” he says, and a little bit of James relaxes at that. “I was just—so _scared_ , James, of losing you, you’ve no idea—”

“I think,” James says, “I do.”

Q deflates. “I guess so. I wasn’t thinking, I know I wasn’t thinking. I just caught the scent, and I had to—I had to make sure you would be safe. I’m not… strong enough to lose you, James.”

James is quiet. They’re passing Gretna Green by the time he says at last, “I told you that once, you know?” Q frowns. “I told you I wasn’t strong enough to lose you. And you told me… that we were brought together for a reason. To never take this for granted.”

“And never be afraid,” Q remembers at last. 

“So no more idiocy like going off on your own after a botched demonic summoning, all right?” James says roughly, and Q presses his nose into his shoulder and breathes, and breathes.

“I’m sorry about your house,” he mumbles.

“I always hated it anyway,” James says.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: My Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

James W. Bond’s early life is well-recorded. Born on the family estate in 19--, he spent his youth in ways typical of the descendants of landed Scottish gentry: romping over the moors, learning to handle rifles and shotguns, and harassing local cows. His father, Andrew, often traveled in his work as the representative of a major arms company; his mother, Monique, of the Swiss Delacroixes, often accompanied him. Though he would occasionally travel with his parents, James spent most of his childhood under the care of the estate’s groundskeeper and various tutors who would describe him in ways that boiled down to “clever but stubborn.” There is very little remarkable about James until shortly after his eleventh birthday, when both his parents were killed in a climbing accident in the Savoy Prealps. Family friend and ski instructor Hannes Oberhauser relocated to Scotland with his son to care for James. Over the next five years, James quickly picked up Latin and German in addition to the French he had learned from his mother and excelled at both school and sport. But shortly before his seventeenth birthday, he disappeared.

James does not speak about why he left. When he resurfaced three years later, he was working as an assistant to rogue priest Anthony Wellcomb, controversial for his views on the literal existence of demons in everyday life. Tax returns paint a picture of an itinerant young man living by the graces of the Church, often sleeping on Church property and listing income gained from the odd maintenance job and errand for a nun here and there. Older Church officials describe that time as an apprenticeship to Father Wellcomb, the only way in which centuries of faithful knowledge on the supernatural can be transmitted in this age of misinformation and uncertain reality. 

After six years doing what one deacon describes as the “hard work” of the Church, James’s relationship with Rev. Wellcomb, and indeed the Church establishment, grew contentious, though they never broke ties. James then spent over a decade as a travelling medium-for-hire. This period of James's life, to hear him tell it, is marked by a cigarette habit and frequent moves from bedsit to cheap flat to rat-trap. Few records remain of his work, though he made a name for himself in the spiritualist community as an unflappable and resourceful “fixer” of paranormal problems; what pay he received was handled under the table. Some clients still remember him; though typically closed-mouth about the problems that sent them to a professional psychic, they can sometimes be coaxed to speak of the aloof but fierce man who helped them.

More is known about Q Bond, née Fairfax. Born in Bethnal Green in 19--, Quinton was the fifth of tutor Melissa and care worker Brian Fairfax’s six children, all boys, and received his nickname early on. Q’s mother died of infection following kidney surgery when he was four, leaving the Fairfax brood under the care of a single father. By all accounts, Q had a happy, if disadvantaged, childhood. He excelled academically, receiving a full bursary to attend Westminster School. His teachers are brimming with praise, though they are divided on the subject of the headlines Q went on to make later in life. He had a special talent for computer programming—perhaps demonstrated best by his brothers’, and later James’s, suspiciously clean police records, though policemen who remember those days swear that the Fairfax boys caused a perfectly normal amount of trouble—but went on to read History of Art at University College London.

Q demonstrated abilities from a young age, but not in attention-getting ways. He remembers doing party tricks for his brothers, like predicting how a coin toss would land. He would inexplicably pick up stray facts about old or well-loved items. His sense of empathy bordered on the uncanny. But these things seemed natural to Q, who was largely sheltered from the other side of London: the city’s monsters, its trap streets, its dark consciousness. He neither wondered at his talents nor sought to expand them, until a first-year seminar brought him to St. Paul’s Cathedral, where a certain paranormal expert was investigating reports of “seeping darkness.”

In 20--, Q Fairfax met James Bond, and nothing was ever the same.

– ♠ –

The week after they return to London, Eve will put down her steaming cup of lapsang souchong. Her eyes will be bright as she tells them, “That’s one hell of a story, boys.”

“Maybe you can write a book,” James will deadpan.

But before that, James finishes the cup of coffee he habitually brews at six in the morning, rain or shine, and pads back to the bedroom, watching the slow rays of a sun that is still burning infiltrate the window, slide spider-like over the sheets and cold wood floors. He runs a hand over Gideon where he’s sprawled over the telly, playing something in black and white on mute and humming happily along with his rusty old purrs, and then a hand over Solomon, who is draped mostly on top of but partly inside Gideon’s tail. They’re a pair, small and fluffy and undeniably dead Solomon and big, bristly, cantankerous old Gideon. Lucky for them they’ve got a human with a soft spots for unlikely but undeniably heaven-made matches, and another human who loves him so very much.

Q shivers as James crawls back into bed. He slits his eyes open, looking disgruntled and not a little catlike himself, and makes unintelligible grumbling noises as James tries the same petting motion that had worked on the cats. “You’re an abomination,” Q says. “It’s four in the morning.”

“It’s 6:47.”

“You’re a liar and a cad, Mr. Bond.”

“I’m awful,” James agrees. “Only an idiot would put up with me.”

“Mmm. Tell me a story.”

James runs a melancholy, questing hand over Q’s thicket of hair and casts slowly among his memories for something good. “When I was eight,” he says at last, “my parents took me to the Swiss Alps to learn to ski from a family friend. I’d tried it the year before while my father was on some sort of awful business retreat, but I’d been terrible, and so I was determined to hate it. The friend had a son, and his name was Franz…”

And as the story stretches on, languid like taffy, Q closes his eyes and breathes. The sunlight grows golden over the covers.

– ♠ –

Excerpt from _Spirit Photography: My Year with London’s Most Notorious Mediums,_ by Eve Moneypenny (2016):

Though their relationship began with a paranormal event, in James and Q’s recounting of their romance, the supernatural barely makes an impact. Q defaults to an amusing story about James being so nervous about proposing that the ring box slipped from his fingers and through the ironwork parapet of St. Paul’s whispering gallery to fall 100 feet to the cathedral floor below. James's anecdotes range widely across the course of their relationship and run the gamut from humorous to passionate: an increasingly confused dinner conversation until Q realized they had actually read two different books both titled _The Cave_ ; their first weekend away in a budget hotel on the outskirts of Paris, custard and chocolate sauce dripping down their fingers as they ate profiteroles; James's nonplussed attempts to figure out what to do with the kitten he bought to surprise Q without fully thinking it through. The occult, when it is mentioned, barely merits a side note.

It is the supernatural investigators, not the men behind the myth, that have piqued the public interest. But to meet James and Q Bond is to learn that it is impossible to have one without the other, the horror without the happiness. 

As their star has risen, people increasingly ask them about the nightmares they’ve faced, their most terrifying cases, what they themselves fear, if anything. But when left alone, James and Q’s private conversation consists of much simpler fare; they talk with each other about movies, and crosswords, and love.

**Author's Note:**

> @me at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com/).
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. Comments on old works are just as valuable, maybe even more so, than comments on new works. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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